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Mooseeeeey

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 22, 2011
5
0
My MacbookPro's Seagate drive failed to spin up about a week ago. I realized the thing was not 5 years old so not a big surprise. I don't have any fully valuable data that would make it worth paying for a fix, but I do have it now psuedo working (after a nice long chill in the freezer). I hooked it up to a SATA harness to USB. It is recognized in Disk Manager in windows 7, but will not initiate due to an I/O error. The drive had Windows 7/ OSX 10.5.8 with MBR partitioning I believe. I now have Windows 7/OSX 10.8.4, but the drive won't show up under OSX either, in finder or Diskutility.

Advice?
tl;dr
-Old drive crashed with bootcamped OS's
-New drive in computer, old drive frozen and hooked up to SATA harness
-Shows up in W7 in disk manager, but will not initialize
-Not shown in disk utility (or finder) in OSX 10.8

(I'm also aware freezing can sometimes do damage, but for obvious reasons let's all assume that isn't the case until I try some other stuff)
 

MJL

macrumors 6502a
Jun 25, 2011
845
1
Before doing anything: do you have another empty HDD? If so then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drive to another one before making any changes.

If you bring it up in disk manager does it show a drive letter? If not try adding a drive letter. Windows does not like to see two bootable partitions and when installing not always assigns a drive letter.... Work around would be to find a Windows PC and on that windows PC create an emergency boot USB or CD/DVD. Plug your faulty HDD in (USB caddy) and boot from the emergency medium. Then with Shift-F10 you can get to the command prompt and then you can access whatever data is still on there.

(hopefully I remembered correctly...)

Good luck

PS there two kinds of users: one kind makes backups religiously and the other kind will make backups religiously .... (after they have lost valuable data)
 

Mooseeeeey

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 22, 2011
5
0
The disk shows in Disk Management, but is in "Offline" mode and cannot be initialized. My current HDD in the laptop has enough freespace on the windows partition to fit the entirety of the old drives data/image. Would i be able to use a cloning program to extract the image onto a drive without formatting, or would it have to be a separate drive?

Also, with the USB boot are you saying that it might not be intializing because it has boot sectors on it? If so, would I be able to use an OSX (10.5) Install disk and use the liveboot diskutility on that?



And while it's not important, I am fully aware to backup important data, but all I really do is gaming on it, and the documents and such for school i have backed up to cloud. Is it sad the only thing I'm really missing is my collection of 300+ wallpapers?
 
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